This paper is a personal testimonial of the Battle of Seattle and the sense of political possibility it opened up. I was born and raised in Seattle, in pre-gentrification Ballard. This was before the walls of condos on the waterfront showed up, back when being from Ballard was a putdown, not a sign of status. Though perhaps atypical for Seattle, my childhood in certain ways reflects the convergence and polarization of different social currents that reflect the social tensions, challenges and polarization in the country, if not the world, today.
I was one of nine children, and my parents were members of the so-called Silent Generation, born before the demographically and culturally significant boomers. A decade and a half younger than my father, my mother just missed the cultural ferment of the ‘60s that consumed some of her younger siblings for a while. While others were hooking up during the contraception-facilitated Summer of Love, my parents, or at least my mother, was busy preparing for her fourteen condom-free pregnancies throughout the ’70s and ‘80s. When we asked how our mother became so enthralled by religion, given her relatively moderate Irish Catholic upbringing, my mom’s younger sister said she was impacted by the image presented by a large religious family that moved across the street shortly after they married. Growing up in a conflict-ridden, contentious family environment, this image of a large, religiously ordered and structured, wholesome family impressed her greatly. They offered a fantasy of religious order that offset the social, cultural and familial stresses happening around her. Married in December ’68, well before Roe vs. Wade and the birth of the pro-life movement, my mother followed a path very different from her peers, and became a willing participant in something that was in equal parts radical and conservative.
The politics of my childhood became entangled with the politics of Seattle in unique ways. As a child growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I found my family’s religiosity made us a curiosity in grunge-era Seattle. Daily church before school, rosary at night, Saturday confession-with prayers, novenas, healing masses, and charismatic youth prayer-group meetings sprinkled in like holy water in between-we were not typical of left-leaning Seattle at that time. The South or the rural Midwest might have been a better fit. At the same time, the Catholic Church had experienced something of a civil war in the mid-1980s, which played out quite spectacularly in Seattle and its progressive Northwest Diocese (Cox 1989, Segundo 1985, Ratzinger and Messori 1986). At the time, peace-and-justice groups abounded at Catholic churches in Seattle. I remember cars sporting “US Out of El Salvador!” bumper stickers filling the church’s parking lots. Archbishop Hunthausen, reflecting the progressive atmosphere on gender and economic justice, let girls become altar servers, and, controversially, allowed the Catholic LGBT group Dignity to host its annual meeting and celebrate mass in the Cathedral itself. He also laid down on the railroad tracks to block the Trident nuclear submarine from passing through and didn’t pay taxes that would support the military-industrial complex (McCoy 2015).
I found the political contradictions of Seattle playing out in my young domestic life as well. Many of my Catholic grade school and high school teachers talked critically about ‘Nam, and bemoaned the rise of Reaganism and the unexpected rise of the religious right. I was caught in-between. A devout young child with plans for the priesthood, I was a rabid pro-lifer, pontificating on demand. At the same time, I had some contrarian tendencies, and loved poking holes in my mother’s religious ideology during our ubiquitous “prayer times.” I became an ecological activist inside the walls of our home. I religiously organized our recycling into the three color-coded plastic cartons Seattle provided at the time; I’ll never forget the image seared into my awakening adolescent consciousness one day of my oh-so-religious-and-morally-upright mother tossing a big, empty tin can of tomato sauce into the garbage! Our mom had us praying daily for the conversion of communist Russia and the souls of aborted babies, yet seemed unconcerned about throwing away half the world’s natural resources. Sacrilege! These conflicting tendencies attracted attention from my generally left-of-center teachers. Entering my teenage years, it was hard not to absorb some of the culturally resistant ethos of grunge-era Seattle. I was also becoming aware of non-normative sexual urges within me. I hoped maybe these were just a “phase,” as I learned was a possibility in “Our Bodies, Our Selves” (Boston Women’s Health Collective 2011) and the book for teenagers, “Changing Bodies, Changing Lives” (Bell 1998), two books I found during my wide-ranging searches at the Ballard library. They weren’t.
I discovered pockets of queer activism in the Seattle of the 1990s. First, I turned to my teachers for help: theater, music, English. One helped me get access to an LGBT youth group, quite different from the Charismatic Catholic youth group I had attended with my siblings before, where homosexuality was viewed as “intrinsically disordered” and demonic. With the aid of my teachers, I got a ticket out of dodge on a need-blind scholarship to a good liberal arts college in the rural Midwest. Four years later, philosophy degree in hand, I moved to New York City, where, serendipitously, a serious of chance encounters with a variety of activists lead me to the Sociology Department at the funky, lefty CUNY Graduate Center.
I had just started my first semester at the Grad Center when I became aware of the upcoming protest against the WTO in Seattle. The previous year, my second in New York City, I had been working at Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the first HIV/AIDS social services organization. I had become aware of the proposed World Trade Organization, or WTO, through struggles I had participated in to make HIV/AIDS drugs available to people in the Global South organized by the Health GAP (Global Access Project) Coalition and South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) (Shepard and Hayduk 2002). It was shocking to learn that life-saving drugs available in so-called First World countries were being blocked from distribution in Third World countries by pharmaceutical companies more oriented to patent protection and profit than saving lives. Having spent the past year working with clients with HIV/AIDS, I found this to be deeply disturbing. To learn that Big Pharma sought to block the ability of Indian and Brazilian companies from making or selling generic AIDS drugs to save people in Africa, Latin America and Asia was sickening. That the World Trade Organization was the medium proposed to prevent life-saving drugs from reaching those who needed it, at the same time, was morally clarifying. Once I heard about the proposed protest to shutdown the WTO, with fervor not dissimilar to the religious ethos I grew up with, I knew I had to participate.
I made plans to travel back to Seattle for the protest, as well as to check in with my family, which was going through turbulent times. The conservatism sweeping the country had only intensified in my family’s case. My mother had read my diary halfway through college, discovering I was gay, and had something of a nervous breakdown. Things hadn’t been the same since and I had been estranged for a few years. Much familial disintegration had occurred. My older brother–star athlete, valedictorian, with both an academic and athletic scholarship to Notre Dame, headed to medical school–had come down with a depression that had put his plans on hold indefinitely. At the same time, a younger brother was developing his own incapacitating depression. What I didn’t realize was the extent to which my mother had gone deeper and deeper into the Charismatic movement, a Pentecostal-and-evangelical-influenced movement increasingly influential in Christianity, including the Catholic Church, that had thrived after the shutdown of liberation theology. Stoked by the Charismatic movement and Y2K at the turn of the millennium, I didn’t realize till later the extent that apocalyptic fervor had taken over my family, as our mother stocked water bottles and holy water in the basement. This trip home for the protest would also be the first opportunity to visit my older brother, who, after a month-long period of homeliness, had moved into a group home. I was, however, aware of the extent to which my two brothers’ health situation had greatly declined, as I had been involved in the decision to move them to group homes in downtown Seattle. What I witnessed there linked the problems within my family to that of the nation forever.
Left Behind in Seattle
Somewhat surreally then, my Battle in Seattle experience coincided with my first visit to my brother’s group home, just blocks away from the protest on November 30. In an interesting way, I think, my experience symbolizes some of the dissonant currents happening within globalization and the backlash to it, reflecting some of the socioeconomic reasons behind the nationalist rhetoric of the white working class “left behind” by globalization. Both dimensions made the Battle itself an irreplaceable experience, particularly for someone raised in Seattle who knew the streets being occupied quite well, and could fully appreciate their symbolic and literal transformation into a “temporary autonomous zone” or TAZ (Bey 2003).
The Battle, for me, was partly about tasting an experience that I had heard much lore about from my hippie-era teachers, but which had largely been unavailable in my lifetime. The Seattle grunge aesthetic that dominated the youth of my generation was a counter-cultural force, but it didn’t seem to have much political impact up to that point. In retrospect, Seattle helped elucidate grunge’s political dimension–anarcho-primitivism-a Northwest creation (Zerzan 1996) that helped define the next decade (or two) of political radicalism. Certainly, it became a point of refuge and expression for kids like me—and the youth of my generation—many of whom discovered that their families’ conservatism was in conflict with who we were. Our protests became a reaction, then, to both the powers of the nation and the dynamics of the Reagan-era family.
For someone situated at the tail end of Generation X, born at a demographic low point, sandwiched between the boomer and millennial hordes, the Battle in Seattle and subsequent anti-globalization protests, in many ways were the closest my generation had come to political significance. It was exhilarating. To see young people my age linking arms and doing direct action to save the planet from climate change, make life-saving drugs available for the Developing World–successfully–and take an apocalyptic stand against the globalizing thrust of neoliberal offshoring and automation was deeply empowering – on the 80th anniversary of the great Seattle General Strike of 1919 no less! It was a stand that, sadly, has not prevented many of the worst things we feared from happening anyway. Indeed, two decades later, in retrospect, the Battle in Seattle prefigured the political situation of today; embodied as a much more enlightened, progressive backlash to neoliberal globalization, rather than today’s reactionary, populist backlash, with its turn towards white nationalism and demonization of immigrants. Both moments also share an upsurge of youth interested in radicalism–though this time more democratic socialist than eco-anarchist.
Perhaps above all else, to experience an upsurge of political radicalism was so significant as it–albeit briefly–altered the national narrative dominated by the religious right since 1980; this is particularly true for those of my generation, who had never experienced an era that wasn’t dominated by conservatism. While Clinton’s victory in 1992 raised hopes, these were quickly dashed by the Gingrich “family values” Revolution of 1994; Clinton’s impeachment for a an extramarital sex act in the Oval Office left little sense of political possibility, much less utopian fantasy for counter-hegemonic possibilities to a dominating religious right. It is hard to overestimate the frustration induced by growing up listening to a larger, more influential generation above you wax nostalgic about the exhilaration of political possibility and empowerment experienced in their youth as the whole world shifted towards radical change and liberation. What made it especially hard was that it was an experience you not only missed, but one that was followed by a decades-long, right-wing reaction to it that defined your own youth. When I first came to New York, I found a number of friends, a decade older than me, that had directly experienced ACT UP! (The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power). I have to admit, I was envious. I was not envious of living through the AIDS epidemic, of course, but of living in an era when gay men were politicized. By the time I got to New York in the late ‘90s, the pendulum had swung the other way, and many gay men I met almost seemed to revel in being “normal” and corporate (Sullivan 1996). Nothing to see here, folks! Perhaps it makes sense, to switch to another modality after living through something as traumatic as the HIV/AIDS crisis. Still, I reveled in my older friends’ stories of Wall St. banner drops, cruising fellow hotties at weekly meetings, and group bonding over political purpose and empowerment. Again, it was an experience I seemed to have missed. Like many of my generation, I was left feeling that I had missed something important, that I was politically at least, born too young.
The Battle and Its Aftermath
But then came Seattle. And, all of a sudden, generational significance. And, for the next two years, there was a wild ride–till the state reaction to the September 11 attacks reinstituted authoritarianism. In between those two short years, a significant chunk of my generation got radicalized. Summit-hopping, or protesters congregating at international finance and power conventions such as the IMF and the World Bank meetings where neoliberal globalization was being discussed and unleashed, was roundly criticized in the end, but let’s not forget each generation’s experience is distinct. Summit-hopping was a new phenomenon, one that mirrored the unleashed mobility of globalized capital and a globalized travel industry, not to mention, of course, the unleashed technological capabilities of the Internet, cell phones and the early social media.
Capital galivants around the global unfettered, so why can’t protestors? Or immigrants? Tear-gassing Bush in Quebec City, taking over downtown Prague and DC: these were only a few of the significant scenes in the summit protests I and others participated in during those incredibly action-packed two years (Graeber 2009). I quickly got involved with the Direct Action Network (DAN) that emerged in New York City after Seattle. It was a heady time; I attended lots of long meetings at Charas, a Puerto Rican Rights community center slated for demolition in the gentrifying East Village. As Oscar Wilde infamously quipped about socialism, “it’s a great idea, but it would take a lot of evenings.” Suffice to say, DAN and the anti-globalization movement “took a lot of evenings”. Inspired by Seattle and DAN, a new student group called FREE CUNY popped up at the CUNY Grad Center, calling for free tuition and resisting the neoliberalization of higher education. I attended the upcoming April 16, 2000 (A16) direct action protest against the IMF/World Bank with our new FREE CUNY affinity group (Menser et al 2000). Then came the Philly protests at the RNC Convention in July 2000. Riding anti-globalization movement momentum, I flew to Germany, where a small anarcho-punk collective helped protesters sneak through the border to the Prague IMF protests, where we literally took over the downtown area and occupied the opera. (To this day, it still amazes me that we did that.) I helped organize the Quebec City protests in April, 2001 against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which, after a long day of direct-action resistance, dodging rubber bullets, tossing tear gas cannisters back at the police, and penetrating the much vaunted-wall, successfully torpedoed the idea. The changing of the wind later in the day also sent all the tear gas back on the police, teargassing Bush, a symbolic victory.
Ultimately, my experiences in Seattle inspired me to see the world as a place filled with possibility for radical action, thought and imagination. While the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ultimately facilitated a renewed containment of anti-capitalist resistance, the spirit experienced and unleashed, albeit briefly, was enough to transmit the utopian spirit to a new generation in spite of practical failures to stop the forces of war and neoliberalism. For example, while there were huge, global anti-war rallies in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, they didn’t succeed in preventing war. And while Obama was a hopeful change, in the end, hope didn’t change much. It wasn’t till Occupy in 2011, a reaction to the 2010 Tea Party in the aftermath of the Great Recession, that the next burst of radicalism erupted. By that time, I was teaching in my first full-time job at St. Cloud State University in Michelle Bachman’s district in exurban Minnesota, where the conservative Minneapolis suburbs meet the small, town rural, at the height of the Tea Party era, and, later, the Madison protests. I’ll never forget the Orwellian TV monitors in the hallways endlessly broadcasting video clips of the WTC attacks, ostensibly advertising a class on terrorism–but mostly keeping fear alive. Yet I’ll also never forget how after I returned to New York City two years later, I heard one young queer man’s story of radicalization via Occupy. Raised in small-town Illinois to an angry, Fox News-watching, working-class, white-nationalist father, he was pursuing a rather narrow, boring, path as a successful corporate fashion designer till Occupy radicalized him; Occupy “changed his life,” opening horizons never imagined before. So we weren’t winning, but we weren’t losing, either. The Battle wasn’t over.
Re-integrating Race, Class, Gender
One of the most significant developments, in retrospect, of the anarchist anti-globalization era that Seattle initiated was the re-integration of concerns of class with categories of gender, sexuality, race and ecology. One of the fallouts of the 1960s was the split between radical leftism and the “new social movements” such as feminism, ecology, and gay rights. I remember feminist professors, before Seattle, complain about the left and its “obsession” with class, historical marginalization of issues of gender and sexuality, a generational perspective that had to be explained to me as I didn’t experience it directly. It was almost as though one had to pick one side, gender/sexuality or class, and stick with it – you couldn’t do both. After Seattle this changed, as a radical band of queer anarchists emerged, or perhaps, radical queer eco-anarchists, for whom the concerns of gender, sexuality, ecology, race and class all of a sudden became less counter-posed. Being a truly radical queer meant being a queer anarchist–which meant taking seriously issues of class and anti-capitalism–whereas up till that time being anti-capitalist was seen as outdated leftist politics. Queer Marxism or socialism largely didn’t exist at the time in any publicly identifiable way. Almost overnight, though, because of the Battle of Seattle, a new language was created or at least refreshed. For instance, a significant portion of the trans movement comes straight out of anarchism–or perhaps anarchism comes out of the trans movement (Feinberg 2004). Perhaps it took people as radical and utopian as anarchists to be willing to take what was considered at the time to be such an “out there” stand. Or vice versa.
Either way, one of the most significant outcomes of the Battle in Seattle cultural moment was just this intersectional integration of categories that had seemed almost impossible to integrate not long before. For me, seeing so many straight radicals finding each other and hooking up in the budding anti-globalization movement at things like the NYC-based Direct Action Network, or DAN–I was envious. I couldn’t help but wonder where all the “queer” radicals were. One of my first romances was with a direct-action activist from Halifax I met in Quebec City at the pre-consulta organizing meeting the month before the FTAA protest, which was pretty cool. Shortly thereafter, though, my search led me to the Radical Fairies, a rural-based network of queer eco-communes with eclectic men’s spirituality and neo-paganism, a kind of queer contingent of the 1979 “Back to the Land” movement. It had plenty of participants in big cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles that seemed to be experiencing something of a revival. Then it led to Queeruption, a weeklong, often squatted, migratory gathering of queer anarchists, activists and artists held in a different global city each year that thrived during the 2000s, with performances, skill sharing, and anti-globalization and anti-gentrification actions. Wantonly utopian, temporary autonomous zones such as Queeruption gatherings were exquisite spaces for keeping the radical spirit and imagination alive–in a time when the radical imagination (Aronowitz and Bratsis 2005) seemed to have been all but “deskilled” by the conservative, neoliberal and religious right hegemony of the 1980s and 1990s. It was also a training ground for reimagining how seemingly disparate issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, ecology and ableism could be re-linked and integrated meaningfully–in ways that today sound seem increasingly like radical “common sense” (Gramsci 1989).
By the mid-2000s, I too was mired in the depression and despair many progressives and radicals felt in the authoritarian, post-911 era, as the Bush administration experienced a surge of support it had never experienced previously, stoked by the nationalist drumbeat of war and rhetoric of the national security state and the anti-terrorist “if you see something, say something” paranoia and propaganda. I did hope Bush would lose in 2004, as his poll numbers were plummeting and the public was finally beginning to sour on him and his endless wars, but he just got re-elected, just barely. Around the same time, the almost three-decade long reign of Pope John Paul II–anti-communist Cold Warrior who, along with his righthand man, Cardinal Ratzinger, in the words of expelled theologian and former Dominican monk Matthew Fox (1986, 2013) “decimated” liberation theology and feminist theology–died. Being a (former) good, now lapsed, Catholic boy, there was a glimmer of hope for change. I’ll never forget the day the white smoke emanated from the Vatican enclave’s chimney and it was announced that Ratzinger, former Hitler Youth member, nicknamed “God’s Rottweiler”–who had occupied the position of dogma-enforcer through John Paul II’s reign, as Head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the same office known in the Middle Ages as the Seat of the Holy Roman Inquisition–was elected pope. It was the only day in my life that I was unable to get out of bed. A few short months later, my old hippie music teacher from my childhood, son of a Lutheran minister who, inspired by Matthew Fox, defected to the Catholic Church back when it was a bastion of liberation theology in the Pacific Northwest, died of alcohol and substance abuse, and likely, a broken heart.
What happened in Seattle, though, couldn’t really be stopped. I found myself returning to scenes of protest and possibility. I had recently gone to my first Queeruption in Amsterdam in 2004 in a former chocolate factory-turned squat. Queeruption was fascinating for an American like me. It had happened annually since its first incarnation in London in 1998, and it is informative to get a front-row seat on the much more prevalent practice of squatting as an anti-gentrification strategy in Europe compared to the US. It was also a strong proponent of the emerging Trans Rights movement, well before its mainstreaming. The focus was not on “passing” so much as being a non-normative “freak”; a “tranimal,” a queer punk. Skill-sharing workshops, queercore-punk shows, no-talent show nights, a sex-positive environment- quite a change from the anti-porn and sex-suspicious feminism dominant in the 1980s and 1990s, the tail end of which I had experienced at college in the rural Midwest. I guess being queer allowed for the side-stepping of certain patriarchal questions endemic to a more heterosexual environment; i.e. fucking the person (who may also be) oppressing you. Instead, consent was a big focus of discussion. Unlike the tendency of Christianity to see sex as a “sin,” sex was seen positively; lack of consent, rather, was the “sin.” Queeruption facilitated the engagement of queer activists around the world, particularly Europe and the United States, but other places as well. Concerns about excessive whiteness were part of the discourse, as well as wariness about “manarchism.” But it was one of the first places I know of that began consciously to carve out separate safe spaces for people of color (POC) – and queer and trans people of color (QTPOC).
Of course, like most protestors of the Seattle generation, I struggled with moments of crisis and burnout. After my second Queeruption experience in Barcelona in 2005, where we squatted an abandoned former pleather factory, I was enchanted, but also conflicted. Though it was time to begin working on my dissertation, I fantasized about running away to Barcelona to join a queer squat some friends were starting in an abandoned castle on the river bank. I was being tugged in different directions; my fellowship helping undergraduate students with writing, which was paying the bills, was coming to an end soon; I wanted to keep my options open and couldn’t afford the apartment I had anymore. I had recently moved onto my friend’s couch for a few months to try to sort things out. Prefiguring the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories dominant today, my friend had become increasingly obsessed with the 9-11 Truth Movement, among various other conspiracies, which wasn’t helping my mental sanity. I started going to therapy every day. My younger brother, who had enlisted in the Army to help “save America” after 9-11 had become increasingly disenchanted with the course of the war and no longer believed in it. Knowing the order to deploy to Iraq was coming soon, he went AWOL and moved to NYC. His need for my aid helped snap me out of my funk.
I’ll never forget returning from Barcelona in early June 2005 after a week off the grid to find the political climate completely transformed; my Dad, a paleoconservative who to this day claims that “no one could ever convince him what Nixon did that was so wrong,” but not exactly much of a political activist, was leaving me multiple messages about someone named Terry Schiavo that “they” were “trying to kill!!” Terry who? The religious right seemed to have “jumped the shark” with that one. At the same time, Bush’s efforts to try to sell America on privatizing social security (a couple years before the stock market crash and the Great Recession no less) had failed, turning off, rather than inspiring, the American public, which had apparently re-discovered that they liked social(ist?) security. A couple months later Hurricane Katrina, along with Republican congressional sex abuse scandals, would help torpedo the Bush administration and conservative dominance, setting up the Democratic congressional gains of 2006 and the 2008 Obama victory. All proving once again that Americans hate government–until they need it. Many anti-globalization activists, sometimes referred to as the alter-globalization movement at that point, given criticisms that globalization wasn’t new, but had started in 1492, and perhaps, more subtly, that it’s wording bore too close a similarity to the anti-Semitic theory of globalist Jews now mainstreamed on the white nationalist right, moved their efforts to helping New Orleans recover, particularly communities of color abandoned by the state amidst the biggest climate change-induced extreme weather catastrophe to date.
Socialism: Back to the Future?
As a queer person, I found that Seattle and the anti-globalization movement that emerged reflected, facilitated and foreshadowed the cross-pollination of issues of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity and ecology with those of class and anti-capitalism increasingly accepted today. It is hard to underestimate how significant the social and cultural changes since then have been, around, for instance, the idea of socialism. I was in the Trotskyist International Sociologist Organization, or “ISO”, for all of 5 minutes when I first came to New York in 1997–a “horizontal entry” as they call it (Google it), searching for a way to enact some of the radical philosophy I had imbibed in rural Minnesota. But I found it very difficult to get up early on Saturday mornings to peddle a socialist newspaper that no one seemed very interested in–especially after a night of clubbing. Interestingly, the ISO has recently disbanded over charges of sexual harassment, becoming another group scrutinized by the #metoo movement (Wrigley-Field 2019; Socialist Worker, “Taking Our Final Steps”). What seems genuinely significant to those paying close attention to the political zeitgeist over the past twenty years is just this reversal around and opening towards the discourse of “socialism”–which had gotten smeared into a very dirty word during the Cold War. Having experienced the tail end of this cultural and political brainwashing, I remember having difficulty even saying the word aloud without feeling some strange, unconscious mixture of guilt and shame. It was similar to my sisters’ reticence to call themselves feminists, after growing up amidst the demonization of feminism by the religious right. Ironically, anarchism, with all its loaded historical baggage, was an easier sell than socialism! Whether due to the fact that the Cold War and Cold War ideology has receded enough, or due to something else percolating to the surface of the collective cultural unconscious, the change in relation to this word and idea by younger generations is a significant development. How far this opening to the discourse of democratic socialism will go remains to be seen; will Bernie be the first socialist president? Will Elizabeth Warren or someone else fashion themselves in a socialist mold, at least for the primaries? What’s clear, though, is that this turn would not be possible without the sort of political activism and optimism that the Battle in Seattle initiated, when it helped a generation to see itself as radical.
What, indeed, does it mean to be a radical? How does it get passed from generation to generation? In what ways does it change with each generational transfer and each generation’s lived experience? At the April 16, 2000 (A16) protests against the IMF/World Bank in Washington DC, I’ll never forget an aging radical staffing the soup line, her voice trembling as she told me “you kids have given my generation so much hope”. It is the small gestures like this that linger within one’s lived experience and make a lasting impact. It’s hard not to see a critical historical opening and re-engagement with historically significant discourses that have been all but cut off since the 1930s–the brief countercultural interlude of the 1960s notwithstanding. For a generation that never had much to brag about, interestingly, I think the Battle of Seattle had something to do with it.
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